March 2022 Summary

Personal

• Day trip to McKay’s Books and the Nashville Zoo
• First month in our Sunday School teach­ing ro­ta­tion
• Grilled shrimp for poboys
• Watched Star Wars with Lydia
• First busi­ness trip in two years
• Men’s ac­tiv­ity: first time at Top Golf (“keep your eye on the ball” is a cliché for a rea­son)
• Memorized Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV
• Three-day trip to Mobile to visit fam­ily and at­tend a work din­ner

My Thoughts

• Tanagers are beau­ti­ful birds.
• There is a spe­cial joy in ar­gu­ing minu­tia.
• God told Moses to make cheru­bim on the side of the Ark of the Covenant: Moses knew what cheru­bim looked like.
• Atheists ar­gue that Christians are 99% athe­ist, and athe­ists be­lieve in only one fewer god. That’s like some­one who be­lieves that no one wrote the Shakespeare plays ar­gu­ing that they be­lieve in only one fewer au­thor than the Shakespeare be­liever.
• Moderns make a strong di­vide be­tween fic­tion and non-fic­tion, but com­mu­ni­ca­tion is never ob­jec­tive. The dryest his­tory book’s fac­tions were fil­tered by the au­thor.

Writing, Links, Podcasts

Notes

• Angelina Stanford
  • When he died, C. S. Lewis was con­sid­ered the best-read man in the world.
  • Moderns see clas­sics as mu­seum pieces; me­dievals saw clas­sics as liv­ing soil from which could grow new Christian cul­ture.
  • Monks dies to pre­serve Homer, Virgil, Aristotle, and Plato.
  • C. S. Lewis said lit­er­a­ture is not a line, but a cir­cle. You need not read chrono­log­i­cally.
  • Let stu­dents make the lit­er­ary con­nec­tions.
  • No one in the Middle Ages read chil­dren’s ver­sions of Dante or Homer, they read the sto­ries that pre­pared them for the clas­sics.
  • Education is not a box to fill. Education is eyes to see.
• Ben De Bono: Leaders must em­power fol­low­ers in­stead of mak­ing all their de­ci­sions.
• Cindy Rollins
  • If Shakespeare and the other clas­sics are elit­ist, why would­n’t you want to give them to your chil­dren (and as many chil­dren as pos­si­ble)?
  • Charlotte Mason said self-con­scious­ness is part of the Fall. We should never con­tribute to a child’s self-con­scious­ness.
• Doug Wilson
  • You are saved by jus­ti­fi­ca­tion by faith. You are not saved by be­liev­ing in jus­ti­fi­ca­tion by faith.
  • Catholics be­lieve grace is in­fused, Protestants be­lieve grace is im­puted.
• Pam Barnhill: A child is not a prob­lem to be solved.
• After World War II, American churches raised funds to help re­build European churches by buy­ing their shat­tered stained glass, which they used to make new win­dows.

Quotes

• “Some books are to be tasted, oth­ers to be swal­lowed, and some few to be chewed and di­gested.” — Francis Bacon
• “The great­est thing, if one can, is to stop re­gard­ing all the un­pleas­ant things as in­ter­rup­tions of one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the in­ter­rup­tions are pre­cisely one’s real life–the life God is send­ing one day by day; what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phan­tom of one’s own imag­i­na­tion.” — C. S. Lewis

Words

• Lemniscate: fig­ure-eight shape
• Tintamar: up­roar
• Knickknackatory: col­lec­tion of knick­knacks